The Filbert Steps

A body on the steps. A neighborhood that saw nothing.

Vivian Salvatore came back to Telegraph Hill with a cat, a divorce settlement, and a book she cannot seem to write.

At fifty-two, newly divorced after three years of separation, she has settled into the rhythms of San Francisco’s most beautiful staircase: coffee at the corner café, morning walks on the Filbert Steps, familiar faces on three corners, and the comforting illusion that everyone knows everyone.

Then, on a bright October morning, Vivian finds one of the city’s most ambitious developers dead on the third landing.

The police are ready to call it a fall. But after twenty-seven years of reading teenagers’ faces, Vivian knows when a story does not fit. A coat buttoned wrong. A cigarette ground out where it should not be. Storefronts quietly sold to a post office box in Delaware. And a neighborhood full of people with reasons to want one man gone.

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